ChasNote

Fred Wilson at A VC speculates that Yahoo would be a good deal for an acquirer right now:

“Here are the facts. Yahoo! trades at a $34bn market cap. They generate almost $500mm per quarter in cash flow, that’s $2bn per year. So on the face of it, it appears that Yahoo! trades at 17x this year’s cash flow. But that is misleading because Yahoo!’s got a bunch of cash on its balance sheet and also owns a nice chunk of Yahoo! Japan. So after you take out that cash and Yahoo! Japan, Yahoo!’s core business might trade at something like 12-13x EBITDA. You could pay an acquisition premium to the public shareholders and still make a return at that price.”

Fred explores the possible suitors: News Corp, Comcast, Time Warner and — the most likely — Microsoft. But Fred says it’s a longshot that a deal will happen: “I think the chances that Yahoo! actually does get bought is slim, but even the fact that the market is having this discussion is a wake up call for Yahoo!’s board, management, shareholders, employees, and customers.”

CNET confirms that Suzie Reider has left her post as EVP and general manager of CNET’s entertainment group (Gamespot, MP3, etc), a position she took over recently after Vince Broady left CNET for Yahoo. “According to our sources,” says Rafat at PaidContent, she’s joined YouTube to run sales and marketing as CMO.

That according to Rex Briggs and Greg Stuart’s new book, “What Sticks” (Ad Age).

Techdirt has a great post on a recent spat between GM and The NY Times that began with an allegedly anti-GM column by Tom Friedman.

“Friedman apparently wrote a piece blasting GM. We’d link to it here, but, of course, the NY Times is working hard to keep their best columnists out of the discussion. In fact, they apparently want them so far out of the discussion that they won’t let those disparaged by those columnists respond in kind via the traditional ‘letters to the editor.’ GM apparently wrote a 490 word response to the Friedman piece, and submitted it to the NY Times, who rejected it as being ‘too long’ …. Finally, the NY Times demanded they take out the word ‘rubbish’ in describing Friedman’s arguments. So, what does GM do in response? They post the entire story to their own blog, which is probably going to get a lot more traffic and attention than the NY Times’ ‘letters to the editor’ would have gotten…. trying to limit a response to an attack column in a world where anyone can post online seems somewhat pointless — and, as in this case, pretty much guaranteed to have the opposite effect.”

If you want to read GM’s side of the story, it’s available without a password at GM’s blog, including the entire email exchange between the NY Times editors and GM’s communications department.

Kind of a coming-of-age moment for blogs, eh? There’s been so much fearful talk in the past 2 years about them crazy, malicious bloggers and the threat they pose to your brand. Now we have one of the world’s largest corporations recognizing blogs as a powerful platform for setting the record straight and publishing the facts or opinions that alternate media sources aren’t covering on their own. Go, free press!

A VC author Fred Wilson, whose site is a member of FM’s network, recently took Sonos onto his site as a sponsor, and then — gasp! — he told his readers all about the deal (Fred’s post). The sponsorship includes 120×600 ad banners as well as a “sponsored by” wrapper around Fred’s “In Heavy Rotation” music list. Full disclosure: As FM’s sales guy, I’ll get paid commission on the deal.

Pamela Parker, in a story for ClickZ, honed in on the fact that Fred asked Sonos to send him their product to try out, and he promised his readers he’d blog his thoughts after he does. “But what if he finds it crappy?” Parker rightly asks. Since Fred himself accepts (or declines) any prospective ad campaigns before they run on his site, and since his site is so closely aligned with the brand of Fred Wilson, I’m guessing he’d be honest, if polite, and not accept future business from Sonos.

A point that ClickZ did not pick up is that Fred gives away his ad-sales revenue. From Fred’s post: “Most of my readers know that I donate all the revenue that this blog generates to non-profit organizations and the money that Sonos pays for this sponsorship will go to FM, who will take their cut, and the balance will go to good causes. I am not doing this for the money.” That policy, it would seem, puts Fred in a fairly unimpeachable position with respect to talking openly about advertisers on his site.

But the broader question is still open: Can journalists talk openly about advertisers on their sites without breaching the trust of their readers?

My post congratulating Boing Boing’s Xeni Jardin on her transparent review of an advertiser’s service (ChasNote 12/14/05) received some spirited feedback. (Thanks for writing, my spirited friends!) It seems to me, though, the answer is yes. If a cable network loses credibility with a viewer, that viewer has hundreds of other choices one thumb-click away; if a website does the same, that site’s readers have millions of alternatives, listed one after another on Google results pages. Technorati indexes more than 30,000,000 weblog sites alone. If a site stops delivering on the promise that attracted readers in the first place, it couldn’t be easier for those readers to abandon the site. And as reader-authors (them bloggers) and other online publications find less credible content at that site to which to link, the Googlejuice dries up, and it becomes harder for new readers to stumble upon that site. Among those 30,000,000 blogs there are undoubtedly a bunch of bad apples and squirrelly journalists. But all 30,000,000 of them are up against a self-policing system that may, in fact, have more teeth than old-school editorial committees.

My friend and former colleague Bob Artner, VP of CNET’s TechRepublic and the voice of CNET’s B2B audiocasts, died earlier this week. A tribute to Bob’s work at TechRepublic is on the site, Bob Artner, 1959-2005. A sad day.

Sock it to em, AdAge!

"Shame on BP. And shame on Morgan Stanley, and General Motors, and any other advertisers involved in assaults on editorial integrity and independence. By wielding their ad budgets as weapons to beat down newsrooms, these companies threaten the bond that media properties have with their audiences, the very thing that gives media its value to advertisers to begin with" (AdAge.com).

I would go further. As reaching an audience–registering an "impression"–grows tougher and tougher, it is all the more important for marketers to seek out media entities that have created deep, meaningful relationships with their audiences. Marketers should be looking for ways to support and strengthen, not undermine, those bonds.